The news Friday that the Department of Justice had decided not to charge former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe got me thinking once again about the legend chiseled into the façade of the Supreme Court: “Equal Justice Under Law.”
Is that what we have? Michael Horowitz, the Obama-appointed inspector general, concluded that McCabe had lied under oath. But as Andrew McCarthy noted last summer, “Government officials who leak while demonstrating their contempt for Donald Trump manage to land on their feet.” Like James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, McCabe left his government job to be a commentator on CNN.
Clapper, McCarthy pointed out,
is best known for lying to Congress about the government’s bulk collection of telephone metadata . . . and for discussing Steele dossier information with CNN shortly before the network published a report about it . . . CNN missed out on former Obama CIA director John Brennan, who falsely denied to the Senate that his agency spied on the chamber’s intelligence committee. Brennan, who said he was really sorry, was inked by MSNBC.
Contrast what happened with McCabe, Clapper, and Brennan with what happened to George Papadopoulos, who told the FBI he had met the international man of mystery Joseph Mifsud slightly before he had joined the Trump campaign when, in fact, it was slightly after he joined. Result: he is nabbed, disembarking from a plane at night, thrown into jail overnight, and was later sentenced to two weeks in jail.
Or contrast McCabe’s fate with that of Roger Stone, a former advisor to and pal of Donald Trump’s. Stone was subjected to one of Robert Mueller’s signature pre-dawn raids, hit with seven felony counts for allegedly obstructing Congress’s Russia investigation, lying, and threatening a witness (who later said he did not feel threatened). Prosecutors — including a couple who were on team Mueller — initially recommended a jail term of nine years — for a nonviolent first-offender. . . .
Read the whole thing. Remember the Strzok-Page “insurance policy”? During the 2016 campaign, the bureaucrats believed Hillary Clinton’s election was guaranteed, but if somehow Trump won, they were prepared to sabotage his presidency, which they never accepted as legitimate. Despite the obvious success of Trump’s presidency, the Democrats employed by the government still don’t accept that any Republican deserves to wield executive authority, and continue doing everything possible to obstruct and embarrass the administration.
The foreperson on the jury that convicted Roger Stone has come forward, and is revealed to be a failed Democrat candidate for Congress and activist vehemently opposed to President Donald Trump.
Tomeka Hart, a former Memphis City Schools Board President, came forward as the Stone jury foreperson in a Facebook post on Wednesday, voicing support for prosecutors in the case.
Hart confirmed to The Daily Memphian that she wrote the Facebook post, but she declined an interview with the newspaper.
Stone supporters were shocked when a review of Hart’s social media posts showed that she posted on Twitter mocking Stone’s dramatic arrest prior to being seated on the jury, and frequently denounced Trump, including calling the president and his supporters racists.
It’s unclear whether Stone’s political views and social media history were disclosed during jury selection, potentially raising questions about fairness that could impact the verdict on appeal.
The judge in the case (Amy Berman Jackson) is a Democrat appointed by Obama. So how is it that another Democrat — from West Tennessee, of all places — is chosen as forewoman of a federal jury in the District of Columbia? This is important, because Democrats also acted as investigators and prosecutors in the Stone case and, after Attorney General William Barr called for a reduction in the recommended sentence, Democrats then demanded that Barr resign or be impeached. It is as if Democrats are seeking to criminalize opposition; merely by being associated with the Republican Party, you are deemed guilty.
Keep in mind that Bernie Sanders’ campaign had people in every precinct caucus in Iowa whose job was to get the voting numbers, so that when the state party HQ bungled the count Monday, the Sanders campaign was able to release its own tally, showing that Bernie had won. According to their numbers, Bernie got 29.66% of the final vote, and Pete Buttigieg was second with 24.59%; in the raw vote total, Bernie won by a margin of 4,012 out of 79,162 votes cast. But for some reason — perhaps massive fraud — the official Iowa Democrat count still has only 86% of precincts reporting and it’s Wednesday f***ing night!
The app that was supposed to help the Iowa Democratic Party quickly report Monday’s caucus results – but contributed to confusion and a muddled result as campaigns were in an uproar – is linked to Hillary Clinton campaign veterans.
Shadow, a tech firm that describes itself as a group that creates “a permanent advantage for progressive campaigns and causes through technology,” is the company that created the Iowa Democratic Party’s app, according to The New York Times. At least the COO, CEO, CTO and a senior product manager at Shadow all worked for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, according to LinkedIn profiles.
Shadow is associated with ACRONYM, a nonprofit dedicated to “advancing progressive causes through innovative communications, advertising and organizing programs.” . . .
Groundbase co-founders Krista Davis, who is the current Shadow CTO, and Gerard Niemira, who is the current Shadow CEO, both held senior positions with the Clinton campaign. . . .
ACRONYM also has picked up funding from at least one dark money group. The New Venture Fund gave ACRONYM $250,000 in 2018 and is one of a number of nonprofit groups controlled by Arabella Advisors — a Washington-based philanthropy company. Both Araballa and New Venture Fund were founded by Eric Kessler, who worked in President Bill Clinton’s administration.
Let me get this straight: Clinton staffers, with funding from a “dark money group,” created the software that failed on Monday in Iowa, thus cheating Bernie Sanders out of a victory? Coincidence?
Acronym, the dark-money group behind the mobile app that derailed the news cycle by causing widespread delays in the Iowa caucus results, received funding from the political operations of Tom Steyer and Speaker of the House [Speaker] Nancy Pelosi, financial records reveal. . . .
Acronym’s nonprofit arm—which does not disclose its funders—received $300,000 in donations in 2018 from the House Majority PAC, a Pelosi-affiliated committee that works to elect Democrats to the House of Representatives. That same year, Federal Election Commission records show, Steyer’s NextGen Climate Action Committee made a $45,000 donation to the nonprofit and paid another $90,000 for its data consulting services. . . .
Acronym’s PAC, Pacronym, was also a major beneficiary of wealthy Democrats’ funding. The committee received six-figure contributions from director Steven Spielberg, former actress Kate Capshaw, and liberal billionaire George Soros’s Democracy PAC in late 2019.
And there it is. The single largest donor of Shadow Inc., the company behind the failed Iowa Caucus app, is George Soros. pic.twitter.com/qifQHVrTBt
This is not a conspiracy theory, because they’re doing this in broad daylight. If you wanted to create software to perpetrate fraud against the Sanders campaign, who else would you have hired? Wait a minute, I think we just got video from Iowa Democratic Party headquarters . . .
We have previously discussed Lunden Alexis Roberts, the 29-year-old Arkansas woman who worked (under the stage name “Dallas”) at a D.C. strip club, where she met Joe Biden’s son, who fathered a bastard child with her. Now comes the news that Hunter Biden, 49, has agreed to pay his baby mama child support retroactive to November 2018, with monthly payments thereafter, and also to pay her court costs and attorneys’ fees. The amount of the settlement is undisclosed, but it is almost certainly a few hundred thousands dollars, lump sum, and three or four thousand a month thereafter. You might suppose that this would be considered big news, coming as it does during the impeachment trial of President Trump, whose alleged “high crimes and misdemeanors” were related to his desire to have Ukraine investigate Hunter Biden’s corrupt deal with the natural gas firm Burisma.
Biden, who is a lawyer, originally denied having sex with Roberts.
But a DNA showed that the child was almost certainly his, and he stopped contesting paternity in the case.
So . . . Biden lied. He did not merely lie, but he lied to a court, and what happens to lawyers who lie in court? Isn’t disbarment appropriate? Perhaps there is some loophole for lying about sex, but whatever the case may be in terms of legal ethics, it is now established as a fact that you can never trust a Biden to tell the truth. Dishonesty is a hereditary trait, and yet every “mainstream” (i.e., liberal) news organization thinks we should just accept Joe Biden’s word that Hunter didn’t do anything wrong in accepting an $83,000-a-month “job” with Burisma:
A defense attorney for President Trump’s Senate impeachment trial slammed Hunter Biden’s employment with Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings, saying the former vice president’s son lacked the experience necessary to land the job and its salary.
“Hunter Biden is paid over $83,000 a month, while the average American family of four during that time, each year, made less than $54,000, and that’s according to U.S. Census Bureau during that time,” said Pam Bondi.
Bondi, 54, submitted a list of articles she said shows Biden did not have the background required to sit on the board of Burisma. She suggested it was his connection to his father that helped secure the lucrative gig and shield him from legal and congressional inquiries.
“When speaking with ABC News about his qualifications to be on Burisma’s board, Hunter Biden didn’t point to any of the usual qualifications of a board member,” she said. “Hunter Biden had no experience in natural gas, no experience in the energy sector, no experience with Ukrainian regulatory affairs. As far as we know, he doesn’t speak Ukrainian.”
She added, “So, naturally, the media has asked questions about his board membership. Why was Hunter Biden on this board?”
But there’s no corruption worth investigating when Democrats do it. Just the cocaine-addicted son of the former vice president, impregnating strippers while on the payroll of Ukrainian kleptocrats — you’re promoting a “right-wing conspiracy theory” if you want to investigate.
The pretext the FBI used to spied on the Trump campaign was fraudulent — that’s the bottom line of the report Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz delivered this week. Among other things, the IG’s report vindicated Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, who in February 2018 issued a memo detailing the many abuses involved in the FBI’s investigation of “Russian collusion.” After the Mueller report and now the IG report, we can say with certainty that (a) “collusion” was a paranoid fantasy manufactured by Trump’s enemies, and (b) the FBI’s reliance on Fusion GPS and the so-called “Steele dossier” was, at the very least, a mistake. At worst, it was a deliberate deceit, and I’m not in a mood to give the FBI the benefit of the doubt. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air finds the Washington Post‘s Aaron Blake attempting to spin the IG’s findings as favorably as possible to the FBI, and failing:
The point, however, is that the FBI misrepresented [information about Steele’s leaking to the media] to the court in order to protect its surveillance warrant on Page. These are a series of corrupt acts that go to the heart of whether Operation Crossfire Hurricane was a corrupt investigation. That is precisely the issue about which Nunes warned in his memo, and the Horowitz report corroborates each of the factual claims Nunes made in that warning.
It certainly looks as though Nunes can claim a very large amount of vindication. The media, on the other hand, should be asking itself why it found Schiff so credible in his defense of secret surveillance of a US citizen by counterintelligence operations on the basis of a discredited oppo research file. Is it that they just preferred Schiff’s anti-Trump narrative above all other considerations?
Yes, that’s exactly what it was — the anti-Trump media has always been willing to believe the worst about Trump, and thus were culpable in helping to manufacture the “Russian collusion” myth, which they then sought to defend against all critics. Aaron Blake still doesn’t want to admit this, because it proves the Washington Post is “fake news.”
Watching the impeachment hearings this morning — Democrat lawyer Daniel Goldman is “testifying,” which is to say lecturing, uninterrupted by questions — one gathers the impression that Democrats believe (a) nothing Hunter Biden did in Ukraine was wrong, (b) it was perfectly OK for Ukraine to “meddle” in the 2016 U.S. election, and (c) it was therefore wrong for President Trump to urge Ukraine to investigate corruption.
The argument Goldman is making is that Trump (and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani) wanted Ukraine to do something that would be politically beneficial to the president’s 2020 re-election campaign — and, according to Democrats, anything that is good for Republicans is inherently wrong.
It is important to Democrats that they keep repeating this narrative of how wrong it would be to investigate Burisma (and Alexandra Chalupa, etc.) because they can’t give the American people a minute’s peace in which to think about all of this and to say in reply, “So what?”
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz has found evidence that an FBI lawyer manipulated a key investigative document related to the FBI’s secretive surveillance of a former Trump campaign adviser — enough to change the substantive meaning of the document, according to multiple reports.
The show-stopping development comes as Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told Fox News that Horowitz’s comprehensive report on allegations of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant abuse against former Trump campaign aide Carter Page will be released on Dec. 9. “That’s locked,” Graham said.
The new evidence concerning the altered document, which pertained to the FBI’s FISA court warrant application to surveil Page, is expected to be outlined in Horowitz’s upcoming report. CNN first reported the news, which was largely confirmed by The Washington Post.
The Post, hours after publishing its story, conspicuously removed the portion of its reporting that the FBI employee involved was underneath Peter Strzok, the FBI’s since-fired head of counterintelligence. The Post did not offer an explanation for the change, which occurred shortly after midnight. Earlier this week, the DOJ highlighted a slew of anti-Trump text messages sent by Strzok when he was leading the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the probe into the Trump campaign.
Horowitz reportedly found that the FBI employee who modified the FISA document falsely stated that he had “documentation to back up a claim he had made in discussions with the Justice Department about the factual basis” for the FISA warrant application, the Post reported. Then, the FBI employee allegedly “altered an email” to substantiate his inaccurate version of events. The employee has since been forced out of the bureau.
In its initial 2016 FISA warrant application, the FBI flatly called Page “an agent of a foreign power.”
Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) have endlessly condemned as a “conspiracy theory” — “unsubstantiated,” with “no evidence” — every suggestion that the origin of the investigation of the Trump campaign was tainted by partisanship and corruption.
For a town that leaks like a sieve, Washington has done an astonishingly effective job keeping from the American public the name of the anonymous “whistleblower” who triggered impeachment proceedings against President Trump — even though his identity is an open secret inside the Beltway.
More than two months after the official filed his complaint, pretty much all that’s known publicly about him is that he is a CIA analyst who at one point was detailed to the White House and is now back working at the CIA.
But the name of a government official fitting that description — Eric Ciaramella — has been raised privately in impeachment depositions, according to officials with direct knowledge of the proceedings, as well as in at least one open hearing held by a House committee not involved in the impeachment inquiry. Fearing their anonymous witness could be exposed, Democrats this week blocked Republicans from asking more questions about him and intend to redact his name from all deposition transcripts.
RealClearInvestigations is disclosing the name because of the public’s interest in learning details of an effort to remove a sitting president from office. Further, the official’s status as a “whistleblower” is complicated by his being a hearsay reporter of accusations against the president, one who has “some indicia of an arguable political bias … in favor of a rival political candidate” — as the Intelligence Community Inspector General phrased it circumspectly in originally fielding his complaint.
Federal documents reveal that the 33-year-old Ciaramella, a registered Democrat held over from the Obama White House, previously worked with former Vice President Joe Biden and former CIA Director John Brennan, a vocal critic of Trump who helped initiate the Russia “collusion” investigation of the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.
Further, Ciaramella (pronounced char-a-MEL-ah) left his National Security Council posting in the White House’s West Wing in mid-2017 amid concerns about negative leaks to the media. He has since returned to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
“He was accused of working against Trump and leaking against Trump,” said a former NSC official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.
Also, Ciaramella huddled for “guidance” with the staff of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, including former colleagues also held over from the Obama era whom Schiff’s office had recently recruited from the NSC. (Schiff is the lead prosecutor in the impeachment inquiry.)
And Ciaramella worked with a Democratic National Committee operative who dug up dirt on the Trump campaign during the 2016 election, inviting her into the White House for meetings, former White House colleagues said. The operative, Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American who supported Hillary Clinton, led an effort to link the Republican campaign to the Russian government. “He knows her. He had her in the White House,” said one former co-worker, who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.
Documents confirm the DNC opposition researcher attended at least one White House meeting with Ciaramella in November 2015. She visited the White House with a number of Ukrainian officials lobbying the Obama administration for aid for Ukraine.
With Ciaramella’s name long under wraps, interest in the intelligence analyst has become so high that a handful of former colleagues have compiled a roughly 40-page research dossier on him. A classified version of the document is circulating on Capitol Hill, and briefings have been conducted based on it.
Alexandra Chalupa is a known associate of convicted-bomber-turned-“progressive”-activist Brett Kimberlin. That the CIA would employ someone with such lax judgment is frightening. Anyone who thinks protecting Ciaramella’s identity is about national security needs to wake the hell up. The fact that someone like this, who was already suspected of illegal leaks to the media, should have been entrusted with classified information — that, my friends, is a threat to national security.
Chalupa worked with Kimberlin — this is not a secret — in the fabrication of the “Russian collusion” hoax. If a CIA employee assisted in that subversive disinformation project? Two words: DEEP STATE.
UPDATE II: When I say that my brother Kirby tipped me to this story, what I mean is this: A few weeks ago, with the generous assistance of our tip-jar hitters, my brother Kirby moved from Georgia and came to stay with our family while he is recuperating from medical treatment. Kirby is a truck driver by trade, but his health problems had resulted in his certification being suspended until he can get clearance from a physician. The stress caused by his unemployment was not good for his blood pressure, and his blood pressure was the problem that led to him losing his certification. Anyway, he’s here with us now, eating healthy and treating his problem, and he’s got an appointment Friday at the Veteran’s Administration. Meanwhile, we had to go get his new driver’s license in order to confirm his change of address, and so today we went to the state Motor Vehicle office — $144 for the new license — and afterwards, we went to Golden Corral for their dinner buffet, using our Senior Citizen’s discount. (Being old ain’t all bad, you know.)
Well, after gorging myself at the buffet — pot roast, mashed potatoes with gravy, collard greens, black-eyed peas, etc. — I had one of those tryptophan episodes, like you get after Thanksgiving dinner, everybody falling asleep on the sofa watching the Lions play the Packers. So I laid down about 6 p.m. and woke up at 10 p.m., and after I got up, Kirby told me, “There’s a story breaking about the whistleblower.” And that led me to Paul Sperry’s report at Real Clear Investigations, which is not just a bombshell, but a whole pile of bombshells like this:
“Everyone knows who he is. CNN knows. The Washington Post knows. The New York Times knows. Congress knows. The White House knows. Even the president knows who he is,” said Fred Fleitz, a former CIA analyst and national security adviser to Trump, who has fielded dozens of calls from the media. . . .
A CIA officer specializing in Russia and Ukraine, Ciaramella was detailed over to the National Security Council from the agency in the summer of 2015, working under Susan Rice, President Obama’s national security adviser. He also worked closely with the former vice president. . . .
Federal records show that Biden’s office invited Ciaramella to an October 2016 state luncheon the vice president hosted for Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. Other guests included Brennan, as well as then-FBI Director James Comey and then-National Intelligence Director James Clapper.
Several U.S. officials told RealClearInvestigations that the invitation that was extended to Ciaramella, a relatively low-level GS-13 federal employee, was unusual and signaled he was politically connected inside the Obama White House.
Former White House officials said Ciaramella worked on Ukrainian policy issues for Biden in 2015 and 2016, when the vice president was President Obama’s “point man” for Ukraine. A Yale graduate, Ciaramella is said to speak Russian and Ukrainian, as well as Arabic. He had been assigned to the NSC by Brennan.
UPDATE III: Jim Hoft reminds us that Mike Cernovich warned the Trump administration about Eric Ciaramella more than two years ago:
Meet Eric Ciaramella — H.R. McMaster Appoints Susan Rice Ally to be his Personal Aide
West Wing officials confirmed to Cernovich Media that Eric Ciaramella, who worked closely with Susan Rice while at NSC, was recently promoted to be [ National Security Advisor] H.R. McMaster’s personal aide. Ciaramella will have unfettered access to McMaster’s conversations with foreign leaders.
Ciaramella’s ascension is surprising considering pro-Trump sources within the Obama administration disclosed to me in December, 2016 that Ciaramella helped draft Susan Rice’s anti-Trump talking points before the Inauguration.
In fall of 2016 as Obama’s director for Ukraine on the NSC, Ciaramella was the main force pushing Trump-Russia conspiracy theories.
Some suspect Ciaramella was one of the original leakers who told the media about classified conversations Trump had with Russian diplomat Sergei Lavrov. While it’s unproven that Ciaramella leaked that conversation, it is now a fact of life that he will have access to every conversation Trump has with foreign officials, as part of his official duties for McMaster.
When this story first came to me, my question was, “This is a huge personnel move. Why hasn’t Politico run it?”
My sources told me other outlets passed on the story, because, “This isn’t the type of information the mainstream media wants out there.”
Staunchly pro-Ukraine and anti-Russia, Ciaramella is the media’s dream, which explains why this high-profile personnel move hasn’t been covered in any mainstream media outlets.
Astonishing! Everybody in the establishment media knew Ciaramella was the “whistleblower” because he had been a source of damaging leaks from the White House, and yet Adam Schiff wants to create the impression that his identity is a matter of top-secret national security?
This revelation will be impossible for the mainstream media to ignore, but what we can expect — what I predict — is that CNN, etc., will portray Ciaramella as a victim of “right-wing smears.”
